“What kind of news?”
“Chaim Wenzler is dead.”
“What?”
“They shot him through his front door. Shot him dead.”
“How do you know about it?”
“Shirley Wenzler, Chaim’s daughter, brought me there. Seems like I’m the only one she trusts.”
“Does she know who did it?”
“She thinks it was you.”
“Horseshit!”
“Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t saying’ no government man gonna do somethin’ like that. All I’m sayin’ is that she really thinks that the government did it.”
“You got anything I can use?”
“I think he was in it with somebody down here. Like you said, he was working with somebody colored. But I don’t know who it is. Whoever it is, though, they pegged me early on.”
“How’d they do that, Easy?” Craxton asked.
“I don’t know, but I think I know how to find out.”
“Did you find anything in his house?”
“Like what?”
“Anything,” he said evasively. “Anything I might be interested in.”
“No sir. But then again I didn’t spend any too long checkin’ it out either. I don’t like keepin’ company with the dead.”
“But you’re working for me, Rawlins. If you can’t get your hands dirty, then why should I help you?”
“Maybe if I knew what it was you were lookin’ for I could nose around. But you ain’t told me shit, man, Agent Craxton.”
That cut our conversation for a moment. When he finally spoke again it was in forced calm and measured tones.
“What about the girl, Easy? Does she know why he was killed?”
“She don’t know nuthin’. But I heard a thing or two down at First African.”
“What things?”
“You got your secrets, Mr. Craxton, and I got mines. I’ma look this thing down until I find out who killed Wenzler. When I find out I’m’a tell you, all right?”
“No.” I could almost hear him shaking his head. “That’s not all right at all. You’re working for me…”
I cut him off. “Uh-uh. You ain’t payin’ me an’ you ain’t done a damn thing fo’me neither. I will find your killer and I figure he will be the key to whatever it is you lookin’ for. At that time you an’ me will come to a deal.”
“I’m the law, Mr. Rawlins. You can’t bargain with the law.”
“The fuck I cain’t! Somebody put a bullet two inches from my head yesterday afternoon. This is my life we speakin’ on, so either you take my deal or we call it quits.”
For the most part I was blowing smoke. But I knew things that Craxton didn’t know. I had the papers and I knew who Chaim and Poinsettia’s killer was. One thing had nothing to do with the other, but when I was finished everything would be as neat as a buck private’s bunk bed.
I had Craxton over a barrel. He finally said, “When will you have something for me?”
“Six o’clock tomorrow. I got some irons in the fire right now. By six tomorrow I should know everything. If not then, then the day after.”
“Six tomorrow?”
“That’s the time.”
“All right. I’ll expect a call then.” He was trying to sound like he was still in charge.
“One more thing,” I blurted out before he could hang up.
“What?”
“You gotta make sure the police don’t mess wit’ me before then.”
“You got it.”
“Thanks.”
In the darkness of my house I spun plans. None of them seemed real. Mofass was all I had. He was the only one who connected everything. He had been up to something with Poinsettia, and I was the one who told him about the taxes and First African. He was the only one I could suspect. If I was guessing right he told Jackie and Melvin about me nosing around First African. So he was really to blame for Reverend Towne and Tania Lee, or maybe he killed them too. And Mofass was the only one with a reason. He wanted my money. He knew that the government would take my property and that he could buy it before it ever went to auction. He knew how to make payoffs. That’s why he didn’t want to sign, because he wanted it all.
I was going to kill Mofass, mainly because he had killed my tenant and I felt that I owed her something. But also because he had killed Chaim and I had come to like that man. He had destroyed my life, and I felt I owed him something for that.
All the things I’d told Craxton were half-truths and lies for him to follow down while I was on my way to Mexico.
Mexico. EttaMae and I and maybe even LaMarque. It was like a dream. It was better than what I had, at least that’s what I told myself.
I sat waiting for a call. No radio and no television. I turned a single light on in the bedroom and then went to the living room to sit in shadows. I had been reading a book on the history of Rome, but I didn’t have any heart for it that night. The history of Rome didn’t move me the way it usually did. I didn’t care about the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths sacking the Empire; I didn’t even care about the Vandals, how they were so terrible that the Romans made a word out of their name.
I didn’t even believe in history, really. Real was what was happening to me right then. Real was a toothache and a man you trusted who did you dirt. Real was an empty stomach or a woman saying yes, or a woman saying no. Real was what you could feel. History was like TV for me, it wasn’t the great wave of mankind moving through an ocean of minutes and hours. It wasn’t mankind getting better either; I had seen enough murder in Europe to know that the Nazis were even worse than the barbarians at Rome’s gate. And even if I was in Rome they would have called me a barbarian; it was no different that day in Watts.
Chaim wanted to make it better for me and my people.
Chaim was a good man; better than a lot of people in Washington, and a lot of black people I knew. But he was dead. He was history, as they say, and I was holding my gun in the dark, being real.
36
I was jolted awake by Mouse’s call.
“Got’im, man,” he said. There was pride in his voice. The kind of pride a man has when he’s paid off a bank note or brought a paycheck home to his wife.
“Where is he?”
“Right here in front’a me. You know, this boy sure is ugly.”
I heard Mofass’s gruff voice in the background, but I couldn’t make out what he said.
“Shut up, fool!” Mouse shouted in my ear. “We don’t need to hear from you.”
“Where are you, Raymond?”
“On Alameda, at that warehouse you said. I come in a window an’ fount his stuff. You know all I hadda do was wait an’ he come grubbin’ up the slide.”
The entrance to the building was in the alley off the main street. Two tall doors held together through the handles with a chain and padlock. When I rattled the door a window opened above and Mouse stuck his head out.
“Hey, Easy. Go on down the alley a little ways and they’s a chute for loadin’. It’s open.”
